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Category: Repression at Home

Signal is a free, easy to use app, for Android or iPhones, that replaces the default texting app. When sending to other users with Signal installed, it’ll perform end to end encryption, meaning the cell carrier and anyone else can not read the message as it passes through the system. If sending to people without the app, it just acts like a normal insecure text.

Signal also supports encrypted voice calls.

Encryption of calls and of texts requires data or wifi connectivity, as communication is routed through the internet rather than through normal voice and text channels.

Of course, no software can replace security culture of a firewall between the aboveground and any hypothetical belowground. But it helps to normalize privacy as a default and makes it harder for corporate or government security forces to monitor everything people do. Documents released by Edward Snowden suggest that encryption methods such as those used by Signal (and by Enigmail for email) have thwarted the NSA in monitoring communications.

Deep Green Resistance believes strongly that for a social movement to be effective, it must have a strategy: a clear path to get from where we are now to where we want to be instead. Effective leadership is also necessary, and should be nurtured. Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” addresses the folly of believing a group can or should operate without leaders; in the absence of a formal planned structure, informal and often undesirable bids for power will inevitably arise.

A new essay by Yotam Marom, sharing lessons from the Occupy Wall Street movement, confirms the importance both of strategy and of fostering good leadership. Marom attributes the collapse of OWS in large part to the deliberate tearing down of leaders and general in-fighting, And without a viable strategy, people in movements are at risk of losing focus on the goals, and instead get sucked into horizontal hostility:

We call each other out and push one another out of the movement, because we are desperate to cling to the little slivers of belonging we’ve found in the movement, and are full of scarcity — convinced that there isn’t enough of anything to go around (money, people, power, even love). We eat ourselves alive and attack our own leaders because we’ve been hurt and misled all our lives and can’t bear for it to happen again on our watch. We race to prove we are the least privileged, because this is the only way we can imagine being powerful. We turn our backs on people who don’t get it, because organizing them will not only be hard but also painful, because we will have to give up some of our victimhood to do it, because it will mean being vulnerable to the world we came to the movement to escape. Our ego battles are a natural product of a movement that doesn’t have a clear answer for how leadership is to be appreciated and held accountable at the same time. Our inability to celebrate small victories is a defense from having to believe that winning is even possible — a way to avoid the heartbreak of loss when it comes.

And perhaps most importantly: Our tendency to make enemies of each other is driven by a deep fear of the real enemy, a paralyzing hopelessness about our possibilities of winning. After all, whether we admit it or not, we spend quite a lot of our time not believing we can really win. And if we’re not going to win, we might as well just be awesome instead. If we’re not going to win, we’re better off creating spaces that suit our cultural and political tastes, building relationships that validate our non-conformist aesthetic, surrendering the struggle over the future in exchange for a small island over which we can reign.

DGR’s strength lies in our realistic plan, Decisive Ecological Warfare, to obtain ecological and social justice. We have a clear focus, a sense that we actually can win, and strong leaders to organize group efforts toward our shared goals. We invite you to join us, and we encourage all activists to proactively develop structures that make sense for their groups.

Adam Federman wrote last summer about FBI harassment of Deep Green Resistance members, and now follows up on an incident last week, in which three DGR members were held for hours trying to get into Canada, turned back, and then held for several more hours before finally being allowed back into the US. Border crossing agents interrogated the DGR members, and took their computers out of sight for hours – presumably searching them for any useful data, and possibly installing malware to permanently compromise them.

Following on the rash of FBI contacts, this seems more than coincidental. Though annoying, it’s mostly harmless, at least for now. It’s important to remain aware of the risks of targeting by federal and state officials in various roles, to be ready for legal defense if necessary, and to prepare carefully for situations such as border crossings where activists are particularly vulnerable. This incident validates the need for a firewall between aboveground activists and any hypothetical underground: those of us who make ourselves public in our opposition to power will be targeted and scrutinized. Only those who stay off the radar can carry out illegal actions with a reasonable level of safety.

The DGR News Service reported last October about a string of FBI contacts with Deep Green Resistance members. Adam Federman, a reporter with The Guardian, has just published an article about that wave of harassment and three recent detainments of lawyer Larry Hildes. Federman shares details of the initial FBI contacts with multiple members, including an especially intimidating pair of workplace visits, and with their families.

The FBI has a long and shameful history of surveillance and disruption of legal organizations working against the status quo. From outright intimidation and assassination to more subtle interventions to destroy the social glue of resistance communities, the FBI has engaged in illegal and undemocratic activity for decades. The recent incidents may be part of a Modern COINTELPRO directed against DGR and other environmental movements.

The article begins:

Deanna Meyer lives on a sprawling 280-acre goat farm south of Boulder, Colorado. She’s been an activist most of her adult life and has recently been involved in a campaign to relocate a prairie dog colony threatened by the development of a shopping mall in Castle Rock.

In October of last year, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security showed up at her mother’s house and later called her, saying he was trying to “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know”.

Deep Green Resistance member Dominique Christina wrote a very powerful piece sharing her perspective and experience as a black woman in an institutionally racist America where black people are killed almost every day via state sanctioned, extrajudicial executions. Christina watched in anguish and grief and anger and terror as the murders of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore drove home the knowledge that her fierce motherly devotion could not guarantee protection of her children from our unjust society. Black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have watched life after life stolen with little or no consequence to the vast majority of the killers.

Christina got involved with Denver Freedom Riders, a movement to attain liberation, self determination, and healing for the black community. She journeyed with other members to Baltimore, to witness and participate in the uprising of anger catalyzed by the latest prominent brutality in an all-too-long string. In her post, she shares her experiences there and relates them to a bigger picture analysis of racism in this country:

My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter.

Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.

Christina’s writing is an important view into the ongoing repression faced by blacks, and what blacks and those in solidarity with their struggles are starting to do about it. Read the whole article and share with friends: Baltimore & Black Lives Matter.

A report by the RCMP’s Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team reveals that Canada state surveillance of, and rhetoric about, grassroots environmental activists is not much different than in the US. We see the same false suppositions:

The well being of the people aligns with that of exploitative corporations which destroy landbases and poison the land, water, and air

Those defending land for current and future human and non-human inhabitants are working against the well being of the people

National security is more dependent on the 1% making massive profits than on a living landbase supporting the 100%

Peaceful defenders are “extremists” for not accepting the above premises and not allowing governments and corporations to do as they please

Burning fossil fuels is not proven to contribute to climate change

Sabotage against industrial machinery (itself responsible for murder of actual living and breathing humans and non-humans) is “violence”

In fact, civil disobedience or anything else that breaks their rules to challenge their power is “violence”

Amongst others named or hinted at as threats are Deep Green Resistance New York, Zoe Blunt of Forest Action Network, and the Unis’tot’en Camp. all operating as aboveground, not criminal, organizations.

Michael Toledano wrote an excellent article for Vice, including quotes from interviews with many of the activists highlighted in the report. He ties the leaked RCMP paper into proposed Bill C-51, which would drastically ramp up law enforcement powers, allowing a “preventive” seven day detainment of those who “may” commit a violent crime. How helpful of the RCMP report to clarify that anyone opposing industry is part of an unpredictably violent movement! Tolenado contrasts this chilling official perspective with his own first-hand experiences reporting on protest actions in Canada.

It’s worth reading the entire piece for an understanding of the lies government agents tell themselves and ultimately the people, a glimpse into the many struggles taking place across Canada, and the indomitable spirit of resistance which won’t back down in the face of increased state repression. As Zoe Blunt says:

“Now when push comes to shove we’ll find out exactly how repressive and violent this government is. They are the ones who are violent. They’re the ones who are criminals. They’re the ones willing to destroy ecosystems, habitats, watersheds. They’re the ones who are willing to put our entire coastline at risk, and everything that depends on this landscape, everything that depends on these ecosystems is put at risk when they put these projects through.

“They’re looking at civil war. If they want these pipelines they’re going to get it over our dead bodies.”

Michael Carter of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, fueled by anger and despair but with only The Monkey Wrench Gang for guidance, carried out acts of sabotage in his youth against industrial encroachment on wilderness. He spiked trees, sabotaged road construction equipment, and cut down billboards. Though he doesn’t regret his impulse to protect life and strike back against the machinery of industrial civilization, he does regret his lack of strategy, big-picture thinking, and basic security culture. Now older, wiser, and working as an aboveground activist, Carter reflects on those underground actions, what he wishes he’d done differently, and what needs to be done today in the face of even more desperate environmental circumstances.

This interview is a fascinating read, giving a glimpse into what might lead someone to consider illegal forms of resistance such as property destruction, the pitfalls they may encounter if they don’t prepare properly, and what it will take to build a larger culture of resistance.

We didn’t know a lot about environmental issues or political resistance, so we didn’t have much understanding of context. We had an instinctive dislike of clear cuts, and we had the book The Monkey Wrench Gang. Other people were monkeywrenching, that is, sabotaging industry to protect wilderness, so we had some vague ideas about tactics but no manual, no concrete theory. We knew what Earth First! was, although we weren’t members. It was a conspiracy only in the remotest sense. We had little strategy and the actions were impetuous. If we’d been robbing banks instead, we’d have been shot in the act.

Nor did we really understand how bad the problem was. We thought that deforestation was damaging to the land, but we didn’t get the depth of its implications and we didn’t link it to other atrocities. We just thought that we were on the extreme edge of the marginal issue of forestry. This was before many were talking about global warming or ocean acidification or mass extinction. It all seemed much less severe than now, and of course it was. The losses since then, of species and habitat and pollution, are terrible. No monkeywrenching I know of did anything significant to stop that. It was scattered, aimed at minor targets, and had no aboveground political movement behind it.

“Operation Ghetto Storm” details how every 28 hours someone inside the United States, employed or protected by the U.S. government, kills a Black child, woman or man. These state-sanctioned killings are the casualties of what the Committee calls “Operation Ghetto Storm”, a perpetual war to invade, occupy and pacify Black communities ― much like the U.S. invades and occupies the Middle East. This report clearly lays out a horrifying aspect of the domestic half of civilization, which anthropologist Stanley Diamond says “originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

Going beyond a compilation of raw statistics and details of killings from 2012-2013, the report, written by Arlene Eisen and with a preface by Kali Akuno, gives important background context and analysis of how racism manifests throughout US society.

Members of Deep Green Resistance Canary Islands are creating a web conference on horizontal hostility, consisting of interviews with multiple speakers. “The aim of the conference is to raise consciousness about the mechanics of oppression
and how its complex but predictable ways operate to keep us all neatly “in our place”, divide us & effectively stop us achieving social, political, environmental & economic change as quickly as we need to.”

The first interview is of Max Wilbert, by Stella Strega. Wilbert describes some of the horizontal hostility he’s experienced and witnessed, mostly around the strong stance Deep Green Resistance has taken in defense of women’s right to their own space. He laments the loss to social justice and environmental movements when activists are incapable of organizing across political differences to work together on issues of mutual concern. This wedge is especially tragic when activists turn a legitimate passion for justice against each other in attacks on insufficient “purity.”

Wilbert also compares classic government COINTELPRO repression of social movements to contemporary Internet smear tactics recently laid out by JTRIG, a secret unit of the NSA. JTRIG is devoted to sowing distrust and suppressing social movements by manipulating online discourse, through, for example, publishing lies anonymously to discredit targeted people and groups.